I recently wrote the following essay as homework for a class on Shin Buddhism.
I see two great forces or trends in the universe: connection and compassion. Mathematically, I would call them strange attractors – the apparent equilibrium or configuration points about which the material universe seems to oscillate or move towards. My evidence of this is that the universe began as a super hot explosion of protons, neutrons, electrons , gamma rays and other fundamental particles. Within a short amount of time, it began to coalesce into stars, dust clouds, planets, galaxies, star clusters, galactic clusters – connection on grander and grander scales. On the earth, there was a glob of chemicals and minerals, then life appeared, connecting these interactions together in a perpetuating sequence. Life organized itself into cells, cells ingesting other cells, multicellular organisms, clusters, consciousness, then the organisms organised themselves into herds, mating pairs, families, tribes, villages, cities, nations, empires, nation states, multi-national organizations, sole-proprietorships, businesses, trade networks and guilds, corporations, multi-national corporations etc. Connection on ever grander scales.
The quality of this connection has not always been very good. Families were often formed by violence or threat of violence against women so they wouldn’t leave. Empires were forged on violence. Corporations got their start with exploitation and wage slavery. Nevertheless, once a connection was established, forces began to make this connection more compassionate, the 2nd great force. Early cities were dictatorships, then we had laws and principles of justice. The concept of rights was formed. Ethical systems devloped teaching conduct toward the weak and the oppressed. Moral and spiritual teachers questioned the rightness of the subjugation of foreign nations, ethnic minorities and women. Some see all the problems in the world today and despair. I believe they despair because they have not studied enough history on a grand enough scale to appreciate how far we have come and because they do not realize that they are a manifestation of the universal force for even greater compassion. As horrible as famines and slavery are, the fact that we even hear and care about these things on the other side of the world is evidence of great connection and compassion. Far greater than existed in the world even 50 years ago. Humans pursue connection first, even if the connection is wretched, exploitive and violent, then work to make the connection more compassionate.
How can this work? How can it be a manifestation of anything universal?
Computer scientists have invented something they call a “neural net” – a network of small microprocessors. Brain scientists theorize that human brains form such a “neural net”. Such nets are capable of learning, but in an unexpected way. If you were to program a traditional computer to, say add up numbers in a column, you would write out a set of instructions step by step and have the computer follow them. Not so with neural nets. After you set the net up, you give it the set of numbers and see what it does with them. Not surprisingly, it likely won’t add them up. No problem. You give the net a feedback loop with the difference between what you want and what it did. Then give it the numbers again. This time it comes a little closer to adding things up. Keep on doing this over and over again with different sets of numbers and eventually the neural net “learns” how to add up numbers. Then ask the question, where, in the neural net is the instruction on how to add up columns of numbers? Answer – in no particular place. Each little processor has a rule it made up for itself based on feedback from its neighbors, but there is no place you will ever find anything like a list of rules on how to add up numbers. The information is distributed partially in every processor in the net. If you remove or damage any particular processor, the net operates a little less accurately for a while and then re-teaches itself how to add accurately again.
This strikes me as the way compassion and connection must be embedded or encoded in the universe. Every proton, neutron, electron, star, molecule, cell, animal, person, bird, rock, plant has a piece of the overall program. This is the fundamental goodness of life and existence.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
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4 comments:
Sean - I meant to respond to your post some time ago. In fact, I thought I had: I wrote a response and intended to punch the "Publish" button, but it doesn't appear on the blog. Oh, well, let us not allow user error or technical problems to subvert the dialogue.
The key to your essay, as laid out in the first paragraph, is the image of a monotonic increase in the size and complexity of physical objects and social organizations. This image is misleading, as neither size nor complexity have followed uni-directional trends.
It is true that, from the time of the Big Bang until the present, larger and larger particles, bodies, and structures have emerged in the universe. However, these structures are not permanent. Reflect on the Earth's iron core for a moment.
Iron is not a product of the combination of basic particles in the first minutes or seconds of the universe's existence. Rather, iron is a result of the destruction of stars. Only when a main sequence star has "burned" all of its hydrogen into helium does the fusion process begin to create larger and larger atoms. These atoms are then scattered through a segment of the universe when the star destroys itself in its death throes.
In other words, there is a cyclical process, in which molecules of hydrogen collect into stars, the stars create more complex molecules toward the ends of their lives, and those large particles become the basis of new planets and stars. Rather than an image of monotonic growth, I see a process of growth and dissolution, each succeeding the other in the course of deep time.
By the same token, I don't see complexity as inexorably increasing in either biological or social terms. In some dimensions, large, diverse social organizations are far more simple in their rules and assumption than the "primitive" organizations which preceded them. When social organizations are small, it is possible to operate with highly complex, indeed individualized rules, taking into account the age, talents, personality, and lineage of each person. (One way to read the Bible is as the record of the Israelites moving to larger states of organization, and the problems of maintaining their highly complex religious life in a more civilized context. Note, for example, the "cities of refuge" as a transitional means along the road from individual revenge to a centralized system of justice.)
In larger societies, and in the big cities within societies, social relations are simplified, pared down. The sociological concept of "role" is applicable to smaller social groupings, but I don't think it would have been developed if not for the existence of cities, which enforce upon each of us roles.
One might think that the universal hatred of bureaucracies and HMOs demonstrates that we always resist simplification and the reduction of the individual to a role. But the success of McDonald's and network television demonstrates that we also enjoy, and even seek out, simplification in some areas of our lives.
The concept of entropy implies that organization comes at a cost. As societies impose more order here or there, disorder arises in other places. You might say that the total cost of maintaining an organization is composed of the product of its size, its complexity, and the degree to which one must enforce standards of behavior. A big, complex, highly rigid organization will be very expensive to maintain, as it will always tend to dissolution.
When one is proposing a relationship of cause and effect, it is a good idea to ascertain that the phenomena involved actually exist. In the case of Sean's essay, the record of higher and higher levels of organization which provides the evidence of the existence of the universal forces of attraction (or connection) and compassion, simply doesn't exist.
This is the logical form:
If A, then B.
Not B.
Therefore, not A.
There are other examples of this sort of thing, and I'll be posting soon about some of these cases.
Well Glenn, I must not have been clear. I don't see a progression of connection or compassion as monotonic. I see it as very bumpy. Only observable as a trend from a long way off over periods of thousands to millions of years.
I understand you propose as counter examples that individual structures are not permanent, that there is a cyclic nature to many phenomena, that some people don't like some aspects of organizations like HMO's etc.
I would respond that invidual structures need not be permanent for there to be some kind of "progress" towards an apparent end of the whole. Individual cells die but the body lives on. Bodies die but species live on. Species die but life still exists. The individual water molecules move in ellipses, but the wave moves on.
That we don't like certain aspects of certain large organizations a) doesn't negate the fact that we have reached a point where such large health organizations exist (something we didn't do 200 years ago) and b) what we don't like about them are those aspects not percieved as compassionate. Our discontent is a manifestation of the 2nd great impulse - compassion.
You acknowledge
"It is true that, from the time of the Big Bang until the present, larger and larger particles, bodies, and structures have emerged in the universe."
That is the only observation I am drawing from to wonder if there isn't some "strange attractor" moving us toward greater levels of organization and connection.
I also noticed that you quoted a standard syllogism at me. Formal logic is very limited. Reality rarely if ever presents us with propositions that we can agree to 100%. People rarely if ever have the luxury of thinking along the lines of "Because X, I will do Y". Reality is more like "I am partially sure of X and it fits my gut feelings, so I will do Y". Business and science get a little bit more quantified with, "We are 80% confident of A with a 5% variance, 45% confident of B with a 10% variance thus C appears to be the optimal action with a 36% expectation value ahead of the alternatives which have even less expectation value." Business and science will often use decision matrices that attempt to weigh the uncertainties and risks with the severities of outcome.
No proposition as simple as "If A, then B, not A, then not B" can approach the complexity of a real decision. That is why formal logic is relegated to computer science these days. I often find it difficult to discuss propositions with those without scientific training because they tend to lack the language of uncertainty and statistics I am so used to.
Some classical logic gives us a little wiggle room in the form of "All, some or none". The "Some is everything from 99.99999% to 0.0000001%. Not very satisfying.
Next, formal logic has no terms that describe the inherent fuzziness of perception. I claim, for example, that there is a trend evident toward greater and greater levels of connection. This is like claiming the stock market is trending upwards. Over what time scale? With what level of "noise"? Certainly there are down days even within bull markets, just as there are periods of chaos even though the longer trend is toward greater levels of organization.
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